Rob Kaper and myself have collaborated on a summary of the happenings at last week's LinuxWorld Expo. We tell you what really took place at the most fabulous booth at the show <grin>. And don't forget to check out Rob's extended and hilarious picture gallery of the event!

The KDE Project used the occasion of
the LinuxWorld Expo in San
Francisco to show off the most recent release of the K Desktop Environment, KDE 2.2. The
Expo was also the perfect place to announce and demonstrate the new KOffice 1.1,
the KDE office and productivity suite.

KDE was represented by Bay Area locals Jim Blomo, Jason Katz-Brown and
Charles Samuels as well as Bohemians Waldo Bastian, Kurt Granroth, Rob
Kaper, Andreas Pour and Chris Schläger. Also present at the KDE booth with
the best of intentions were Paul Campbell, Bill Huey and Eunice Kim.

One of the highlights of the event was the announcement that KDE had won the
LWE Excellence Award for Best Open Source Project. After receiving the
award, it was proudly displayed at the booth by the developers present, who
felt it was great to see appreciation for the combined efforts of the entire
KDE community.

Over the three days that the exhibition was open, many visitors were seen
at the KDE booth. Most of them were impressed by the demonstrations given.
Most popular were Konqueror,Noatun-plugin Madness, the Internet
keyword architecture, renewed text editor Kate and especially the KIO
slave architecture.

Demonstrating the kio_audiocd plugin with the flair of a magician
("see, this is a regular CD") to rip and encode audio tracks to
MP3 and Ogg Vorbis almost caused some
visitors to leave the exhibition so they could install KDE on their
computers immediately. Also met with great interest was the mention of the
kio_freenet and kio_sftp slaves for respectively the Freenet distributed file network
and secure file transfers using SSH.

Interest from the media was also intense. Andreas was forced to purchase
lozenges to protect himself after the large number of interviews the
KDE League's PR firm arranged for him (thanks Eunice!). Earlier in the
week Andreas took part in a live interview and another recorded interview forTechTV, an international
technology cable channel.

One of the most frequently asked questions at the booth was the
difference between KDE and GNOME, the two most popular open source
desktops. Most users did not realize
that both projects share the same goals (improving UNIX usability) while
approaching them from a different technical point-of-view. Despite popular
belief, the KDE
developers and GNOME developers did not engage in WWIII but instead met
under friendly conditions. Andreas also met with Nat Friedman fromXimian in an effort to improve
relations and to discuss ways that KDE and GNOME can work together to make
Open Source more attractive to computer users. The meeting went very
well and concrete actions to improve KDE/GNOME interoperability were
discussed. Some of these ideas were already planned in a KDE/GNOME hackfest
to be held at the XFree
Technical Conference this November under the umbrella ofKeith Packard of theXFree86 Project.

Some other frequently heard requests were for CD's with KDE installed
and whether MieTerra's big stuffed Konqi could be given away. For various
reasons the KDE team could not comply, but were able to point to a page
on the KDE website with third part CD-ROM resellers and KDE merchandise. It should also
be mentioned that most Linux distributions ship with KDE, many of which have
it as the preferred or default desktop environment. We would like to
specifically mention both SuSE and Mandrake and thank them for the hardware
they contributed for the KDE booth. Another thank you goes to the KDE League for providing food for the
developers in attendance.

A photo impression of the event and the KDE booth made by Rob Kaper is available here.

Comments

If you happened to be among the few early birds who landed on a slow server for the picture page, my apologies. Apparently convert did not compress the images, making the thumbnails 25k each instead of the 5k they are now.

Also, most links should now point to my jadzia server which (while being a mere P100) has a much better uplink (1Mbit) than ezri.

Crappy Kodak DC215 Zoom. Pictures of items nearby are usually pretty good, however it's a bit blurry often for items in the background and when there's no full light. And it eats batteries. But for only $200 a year ago, it's a pretty decent camera.

Have my heart set on one of the new Fuji models. Those are purty. Especially the 6900, now that's a camera!

Got my hands on a DC3400 (basically an updated DC280) some time ago, although it was recently made obsolete by the DX3600. I like it very much actually -- it takes very good pictures, beautiful colour, strong flash, etc. Once I was even lucky (?) enough to get significantly better pictures than a rival Canon A20 owner under tough indoor/low-light conditions. ;)

And of course, most Kodaks are supported fine under Linux thanks to Gphoto. Overall, I've gotten a very positive experience from the dc3400 and tend to view Kodaks favorably these days.

Speaking of Linux Camera Support, my new Olympus D-510Z (aside from excellent picture quality) has a feature called "USB-Autoconnect", which is a fancy way to say that the camera behaves as a USB mass storage device. Under Mandrake 8.0 all I had to do is plug the USB cable, and Linux automatically loaded the proper modules and recognized it as a scsi device (/dev/sda1), then I setup a mount point and added it to fstab. Now I can access the camera from Konqui, load/store files, view/generate thumbnails, without the need of the gphoto ioslave...sweet!
Only one complain: Konqui (or Linux itself?...it'll be easy to find who's guilty ;)) is constantly polling the camera (as the transfer LED blinks all the time, meaning access to the smartmedia card), which in the long run drains more power.

Colour me jealous, although I don't really like those smartmedia cards. I've heard only good things about the Olympus models, but those smartmedia cards do need some maintaining with those exposed pins and all...

Noatun came with my KDE-2.2. Perhaps you bought a defective one. Take it back to your retailer and get a return :-)

Quanta is nice, but not included. It would be nice if every good KDE application were included in KDE, but then the download times would reach another order of magnitude. Some things need to be left out of the base distribution, as it's getting too big as it is.

Outside of certain metropolitan areas, most people are still on 56K modems. Let's not frustrate them with a 56Meg packages.

how do I set konq up to do this? where do I find this plug-in?
I am so happy about this feature, this has been lacking I think for a long time, I just wanted the ability to browes my music CDs, but KDE has taken it a step further, and allowed autoriping/encoding.....I love that :)

kio_audiocd is part of kdebase for 2.2 if not already since 2.1. Support for encoding to mp3 and ogg depends on whether the LAME and Vorbis libraries were found during compilation, I'm not sure how the various distributions handle this.

Just enter audiocd:/ into Konq's Location bar and off you go. Drag and drop files from the various subdirectories to another folder or your desktop to start encoding! The audiocd:/ link should also be available under Services in the Konqueror sidebar.

First of all, I've expressed some skepticism in the past of whether the KDE League is doing anything useful. I'm happy to see that I was wrong and it sounds like they contributed a lot here, with financing and the PR. One suggestion, though:

>>>Some other frequently heard requests were for CD's with KDE installed...it should also be mentioned that most Linux distributions ship with KDE, many of which have it as the preferred or default desktop environment.<<<

Actually, there was a discussion about this at one point on the promo list.... It's not really feasible... You can only fit 1 or 2 Distros per CD(I don't know the size of the current tree off-hand...) So it would be rather expensive.......

> You can only fit 1 or 2 Distros per CD(I don't know the size of the current tree off-hand...)

It is a bad thing that each distro installs KDE in a non standard way. Because this standard does not exist...
It would be good that the KDE team deliver some install recommandations so that KDE would be installed in a "standard" way... No ?

An other davantage would be that a KDE user would change its distro and keep its KDE config...

You see, this KDE things only well known for people who are involved in Linux, not in popular presses where the opinion making for masses are created.
All these "great" things about KDE only known among yourself. That's way I said you peoples just keep masturbating.
Look at Gnome, Ximian or DelCaza, they are very popular in presses and sometimes in some very positive articles and headlines.
So...Where is KDE in mainstream press?
NONE....

Yes,it does.
Mainstream press leads to company interest, which leads to company involvement, which leads to investments, which leads to more hackers hacking full time, which leads to more apps.

Both Linux and KDE are far past the point where they can ignore the rest of the world if they want to grow. Industry and mainstream support are needed to bring the projects forward, and this can only be done if the industry and mainstream have heard of the project.

I totally agree! The Ximian booth was beautiful and well worth the money! I think the participating parties in the KDE League should spend $50k on a booth for KDE next year instead of hiring developers! :-)

Nowhere I suggested that KDE league should stop hiring developers or anything like that.
But you guys have to confess De lCaza, Ximian or gnome has won mainstream press attention and appear in the mainstream press FAR a lot more than KDE or KDE developers.
And these KDE peoples keep proud on their OWN website that they are 'the best open source project' or 'the leading linux desktop'.
Reality shows that outside Linux users, De lCaza and his Ximian has been known as the leader/representative Open Source (read: Linux) movement, like it or not.
Time Magazine, Washington Post etc or even Holywood movie has depicted de lCaza a hero of Open Source Movement.
What about KDE project, Matthias Ettrich or KDE guys? I surely not the only one who notice there is no mainstream press mention them...

You can't possible mean that it's not a good desktop?!
I mean, although I prefer gnome, I still think KDE is a
nice desktop environment..

As for : ..."still nowhere near KDE-2.0" -> what in h... do you mean?
Talking as a user or a developer?

For my use, I find Ximian gnome (in current state) to be superior
compared to KDE (and yes, I've tried the latest version).

The Ximian desktop and menues are less bloated compared to KDE, which makes
Ximian more plesant to use. Moreover, I still have not found a KDE mail client
comparable to Evolution. Red Carpet, the update tool for ximian is a killerapp,
and KDE has nothing to offer on that side. I could go on and on..

KDE is very feature rich and is a nice environment to work with, or it would be,
if I took the time to remove all sort of things that I don't need.(even though KOffice is nice, it is useless for my purposes. I need to use StarOffice or OpenOffice for my needs).

It is a much better desktop than kde-1.2 right now, but from my (admittedly short) plunges into Gnome-1.4, there is still alot missing. E.g. Xmms is nice, but does not "fit" into the desktop one bit. Same for Mozilla.
I would miss the internet awareness of KDE. The seamlessness. Everything just looks the same, behaves the same and so on. Gnome is pretty, but not as streamlined. And I would miss stable true type font support with AA.

Abiword e.g. is nice, but not very gnome specific. Could you please explain to me why I would ever choose the gnome variant of an app over a gtk variant? What do I get, what do I miss?

Finally Red Carpet: What is this? "Red Carpet, the update tool for ximian is a killerapp" It does not work with my distribution, it will trickily remove KDE (from what I have heard), it will modify my stystem. How is updating an "killer app" ? Check out SuSE You or Debian aptget. Same thing. Not very desktop specific.

Mozilla is not part of GNOME, it's independend.
If you want a browser that integrates better than Mozilla, use Galeon.

> And I would miss stable true type font support with AA.

Actually, there is already a patch for AA for GTK+ 1.2.
It's not perfect, but AA and font hinting will be supported completely in GTK+ 2.0.

> Abiword e.g. is nice, but not very gnome specific. Could you please explain
> to me why I would ever choose the gnome variant of an app over a gtk variant?
> What do I get, what do I miss?

GNOME dialog boxes, the use of gnome-print.
The GTK+ version is for people who, for some weird reason, thinks gnome-libs is "bloated", or simply doesn't have gnome-libs installed (though I can't imagine why anybody doesn't want to install gnome-libs).

Compare it to Licq. You can choose to use pure QT or add KDE support.

> Finally Red Carpet: What is this? "Red Carpet, the update tool for ximian is
> a killerapp" It does not work with my distribution, it will trickily remove
> KDE (from what I have heard), it will modify my stystem. How is updating
> an "killer app" ? Check out SuSE You or Debian aptget. Same thing. Not very
> desktop specific

"trickily remove KDE", that problem is resolved long ago.
This was a bug in the dependency handling in some prerelase of Red Carpet.
I use Red Carpet regularly and KDE and all it's apps still works fine without any problems.

And Red Carpet is not tied to GNOME or even RPM.
You can port it to DEB or add a KDE channel (which is not likely to happen, since none of you KDE people trust Ximian for some reason).

> > And I would miss stable true type font support with AA.
>
> Actually, there is already a patch for AA for GTK+ 1.2.
> It's not perfect, but AA and font hinting will be supported
> completely in GTK+ 2.0.

He said he wanted STABLE true type AA support (now). Why do you reply
with something that you admit is not stable right now, but will be
perfect in FUTURE?

> GNOME dialog boxes, the use of gnome-print.
> The GTK+ version is for people who, for some weird reason,
> thinks gnome-libs is "bloated", or simply doesn't have gnome-libs
> installed (though I can't imagine why anybody doesn't want to
> install gnome-libs).

Why would I install something I don't use? AFAIK, but I could be wrong, GTK+
version of AbiWord doesn't lack any functionality to other versions.

I've used GNOME a bit at this year's OLS and had the same feeling as
last year. Better than used to be, but not there for ME. Neither is KDE, but
it's definitely much closer.

> Why do you reply with something that you admit
> is not stable right now, but will be perfect in
> FUTURE?

Because it can be a good TEMPORARY solution until the perfect implementation is ready!
Or would you rather wait for GTK+ 2.0?

And besides, the AA patch works very well for many people.

If we use your reasoning, then why should developers release prerelases at all?
Prereleases are not perfect either.

> Why would I install something I don't use? AFAIK,
> but I could be wrong, GTK+ version of AbiWord doesn't lack any
> functionality to other versions.
Then DON'T use it! Nobody force you to download the GNOME version!
Let the developers do what they want to and stop complaining!

Look, can you tell me which part is so troubling for you to understand?

He said he wants AA support NOW. KDE has it, GNOME doesn't yet (stable one that is). Judging by your replies, even you agree with that, but for some reason you think you need to justify GNOME.

I have nothing against prereleases and I really can't see how you could misconstruct what I think in that way, but I really don't care. It has nothing to do with what was debated.

About second part...you yourself asked why anyone wouldn't want gnome libs and I told you. Because I have no use for it. Abiword (which was application discussed) works the same without it (right now). Someday it probably won't and then I might feel the need to have gnome libs too, but right now there's no such need.

So where did I complain? You probably mean the last paragraph with that but I haven't said anything developers don't think themselves. If they didn't think that, they would have nothing to do because their work would already be finished.

> Look, can you tell me which part is so troubling for you to understand?

Can you tell me which part you don't understand?
I never offered a solution, I merely stated that GTK+ 1.2 has limited AA support now and that it will fully support AA in the future.
I never told him that it's a good solution for him.
But don't you think other people deserves the right to know about it?

> Someday it probably won't and then I might feel the need to have gnome
> libs too, but right now there's no such need.

Then what's your problem? It's not like anybody force you to use it.
And porting AbiWord to gnome-libs now will make porting it to GNOME 2.0 and Bonobo much easier, now that the AbiWord codebase is still relatively small.

I'm sorry, but you really piss me off. You really like to argue, don't you?

No matter how benign I try to write it, you'll always find something to argue about. If you are such a tender spirit, what the hell are you doing on site where you know you'll find more than plenty of people who disagree with you.

Anyway, I've had enough. I'll just ignore you from now on which is too bad because at first you actually sounded reasonable.

Oh and you think you don't piss me off? Whenever I try to prove that GNOME is not as inferior as you think, you find another reason to complain about.
If you want to ignore me, then fine, go ignore me. I don't care.

My personal experience: KDE is a MUCH better "newbie" desktop. GNOME is a marginally better "power user" desktop. As a "power user" myself, I use GNOME. But my wife, who lies somewhere in between (far, far above the level of most of today's "newbies", comfortable with a limited number of commandline commands "killall netscape" etc) wouldn't switch to Linux fulltime until I showed her KDE.

I really tried to like KDE: switched my home machine's default login for over a month. But I couldn't - the major factor for me was the general feel of bloatiness. Note that I'm NOT accusing KDE of *being* bloated, just of *feeling* bloated. Apps took a LONG time to start, and for some (psychological) reason KDE apps (like konqueror) feel like they should be "light" applications which you can start instantly. Konq is much faster to start than Mozilla, but I found Konq impossible to browse in because I always wanted to open new Konq windows (which is still slow), wheras with Moz it somehow feels more heavyweight and you don't have the inclination to stop-and-start it so much (I keep two windows open at all times and just reuse them). Other GNOME applications definitely feel faster to start - gnome-terminal over konsole, or Abi over KWord.

I feel that GNOME is good if you want the desktop environment to stay out of the way, which is what I do. If you want a complete and integrated feel and don't mind paying a slight performance cost, though, get KDE.
Either is the right decision :)

Funny... I think of it as exactly opposite.
KDE actually has too much features, and too disorganized menus for it to be
truly user friendly.
Nautilus is also way easier and prettier than Konqueror.

That said, KDE and Konqueror does have more features, and is better
integrated. Technically KDE is a bit ahead in the desktop-area, while in
applications there is pretty much a tie. KDE is way ahead in Office-apps, GNOME a little bit ahead in browsers (Galeon vs Konqueror), quite a bit ahead in email (Evolution vs Kmail), way ahead in updating (Red Carpet vs nothing) and quite a bit ahead in configuration ( Ximian Setup Tools, which are sweet btw.).
In i18n KDE is way way way ahead.

every one keeps refering to ximian v. KDE but remember that ximian is a company and has Redcarpet and evolution as product. KDE is a not profit Org and would therefor not have some features that ximian does. however, since KDE is more feature ritch and easier to integrat stuff into thanks to Kparts, I think it would be realy cool if TheKompany.com came out with its own version of KDE that it could use to leverege its app onto. then one could see a redcarpet type application and TheKompany.com has an outlook type app that does what evolution will do. as far as it is now though, comparing ximian to kde is like comparing apples to oranges, it would be better to compare the stock Gnome DE to KDE.